


trust a shaking mind

by SyntheticRevenge



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Hackers, Drug Use, Leitner Books (The Magnus Archives), Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28876833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyntheticRevenge/pseuds/SyntheticRevenge
Summary: Gerry's seen word processors built for impossible, overwhelming, and nauseating languages; chat bots that nearly perfectly mimic loved ones; meditation programs that completely shut off all real-world sensory inputs--name it, he’s destroyed it, save for one.This, though, this--thisthinghe’s staring at now, in the middle of a perfectly reasonable, if unsettlingly empty rendering of old-world Siberia, it’s weird, and not in a standard Leitner way. It doesn’t fit this wide, overwhelming, barren landscape. It doesn’t fitanything. It’s all disconnected pixels and glitching particle effects, somehow surrounding him and converging into a form at the same time.(Gerry's a decker. Michael's a glitch that haunts corrupted programs.)
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Gertrude Robinson, Gerard Keay & Mary Keay, Gerard Keay & Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 14
Kudos: 41





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am absolutely obsessed with this AU, and even though this is short for a first chapter, I had to post it. I don't imagine this fic will end up very long, but I might write other things set in this AU! Title's from Shifting by Now, Now. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> CW: weed, possibly disturbing sensory hallucinations

In Gerry’s line of work, deckers are bound to encounter some weird shit. Digital spiders the size of trucks that hack into your dermal ports and make you feel like you’ve got eggs under your skin? Yeah, check, that’s a fucking Tuesday digging through old bootleg Mother of Spiders .exe files, and no, the feeling doesn’t fade once you jack out, it takes a  _ lot _ of weed and sometimes stronger shit to take care of that.

That’s not even the eeriest thing about those games (Gerry has a long list of eerie things about those games), but it’s the most obvious, and the thing that makes the most people quit Leitner-hunting. It’s all vigilante justice and edgy decker lore until you’re in the hospital because you try something more intense than fingernails trying to get the spiders out of your body. 

No one really ever got farther than that until Gerry. Not that he’s a prodigy or anything, he just  _ really _ hates Leitners. And Leitner. That guy was a piece of shit on every level, but publishing obscure, legendary, cursed malware in obscure corners of the matrix and letting people edit the original file if they can wade all the way through it was a fucking tar pit trap for obsessive deckers.

Gerry’s famous on the Leitner-hunting forums as the first person to ever destroy a Leitner file. He was the only one for a long time, before Gertrude Robinson. That almost felt insulting, to share one of the great honors someone in his line of work could hold with an old woman who didn’t even want to waste time coming up with a decent name, but that was before he met her. He’s honored now. They share notes, and when she runs across Leitners, he’s the first person she calls.

Point was, he’s seen some shit. The spiders, yeah, and the way the Mother of Spiders games send tendrils into the player’s nervous system and take it over, to the point where they sort of...play themselves, using their victim as just sort of a flesh puppet necessary to go through the motions, and--look, he’s just finished destroying that entire series, game by miserable game, and he’s a little fixated and haunted still, sue him.

But he’s seen word processors built for impossible, overwhelming, and nauseating languages; chat bots that nearly perfectly mimic loved ones; meditation programs that completely shut off all real-world sensory inputs--name it, he’s destroyed it, save for one. The Catalogue of the Trapped Dead, as melodramatic a name as any Leitner. He can’t crack that one.

This, though, this--this  _ thing _ he’s staring at now, in the middle of a perfectly reasonable, if unsettlingly empty rendering of old-world Siberia, it’s weird, and not in a standard Leitner way. It doesn’t fit this wide, overwhelming, barren landscape. It doesn’t fit  _ anything _ . It’s all disconnected pixels and glitching particle effects, somehow surrounding him and converging into a form at the same time.

Maybe all the hunting finally fried his brain and his implants are just done for and he’s hallucinating afterimages like bad acid flashbacks, or maybe there’s actually something here. A ghost in the machine.

Or, maybe, somehow, impossibly, someone beat him to the file editor and just...edited the program without destroying it, but Gerry can’t fathom why anyone would do that. 

He calls out to it. The pixels strobe in response, and Gerry can almost hear a voice, but the bit rate is so low he can’t understand what it says, if anything. The  _ thing _ , whatever it is, fades, and Gerry’s left there, blinking, too unfocused to figure out how to get through the program, so he jacks out. 

He has so many ports by now that jacking out is an arduous fucking task that honestly takes way longer than it should, but he likes the maximum sensitivity, and the quick, comprehensive inputs. It’s the only way he’s managed as well as he has so far.

He pulls his hair back, flicks music into his cochlears with an idle finger, and slides out the window onto his fire escape, pulling his knees to his chest and staring out at London. He used to think the view was beautiful, but that was a long fucking time ago. He lights a joint and pulls, mind drifting back to that thing he encountered. 

It felt like a  _ presence _ , like another decker, but...stronger, and--otherworldly’s a stupid word, considering everything about the context of the situation, but it’s all that comes to mind.

It’s probably just something in the program. He’s probably overreacting. It’s just--he  _ knows _ Leitners, and they all at least...they stick to the mission statement. The type of program you sign up for is the type you get. Simulation of empty, Siberian wasteland doesn’t fit with confusing pulsing rainbow being. There’s something here.

Before he can stop himself, he’s jacking back in, still smoking, and calling Gertrude as he launches the file again.

“You’ve destroyed it already?” she asks, audibly distracted.

“No,” Gerry says, choking on smoke and coughing. “Something’s fucky.”

“Gerard.”

“I mean something’s _ wrong _ , there’s something here,” Gerry says. “Think it’s already been edited.”

“Doesn’t make a difference,” Gertrude says. “Exercise caution, I guess, but you still have to destroy it, edited or not.”

“Yeah, but--”

“Unless you can’t handle it,” Gertrude says. “In which case I’m perfectly capable of doing it for you, but I  _ will _ be taking my rig back.”

“You are absolutely not going to do that,” Gerry says, scoffing and taking another hit, rolling his shoulders as the program loads.

“Then do your job.”

“Working on it,” Gerry says, sighing.

He’s in Siberia again. The cold pixelates on his skin and in his bloodstream, and he shudders as the wind blows through him. There aren’t landmarks. The sky’s white. The ground’s white. There’s nothing to do except walk. He hates these fucking war-of-attrition Leitners. He can at least  _ fight _ when the programs have monsters.

There’s also no weird whatever-that-thing-was, so maybe Gerry’s just losing it. He finally gets to the other end of the wasteland, relatively unbothered and pretty stoned, and when the file compresses and lands in his tattooed, virtual hands, he burns it without a second thought.

He tries to shake off the prismatic ghost encounter. Weird things happen in haunted files, and if you don’t keep pushing forward, you lose your mind. He’s determined, at least, to not go the way his mother did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: drug use, memory loss

The second time Gerry hits the glitch he’s not even in a Leitner. He’s killing time playing a variant of poker he doesn’t quite understand and idly seeing if he can hack around the anti-cheat engine the casino’s running as he goes. 

He can’t, it’s pretty watertight, even for him. People get extra careful about their matrix security where money’s concerned, and it’s not like that’s Gerry’s speciality, particularly. He’s just fucking around, besides. Gertrude said she might have something on the Circus, that group of glitching, form-shifting hacker fucks that steal deckers’ identities and lock them out of the matrix for the purpose of committing untraceable atrocities. She thinks they’re trying to crash all of Britain’s servers, somehow, which, y’know. Mass blackouts with no backups equals brain damage, financial ruin, etcetera. Fucks with corps, sure, so Gerry can’t  _ completely _ hate the plan, but the rest of it isn’t great.

Gerry loses a fifth hand, decides this might not be the best use of his time or money, and raises a hand to switch apps, but as the UI overlay slides down--

The glitch. Brightly colored and completely devoid of pattern. Gerry tries to dig into the casino’s source code, but he’s locked out. He tries to ask the person he’s playing with if they can see it, but no sound comes out, their vocal implant locked and offline. The thing strobes closer, that less-than-8-bit voice crescendoing around him, and then--an eye, hundreds of scattered pixels in size, with a spiralling pupil--

\--he’s on the streets of London. Meatspace. His tattoos are ports again, cold and hollow. The only way he can tell anymore. He can’t remember jacking out. He has no idea where he is. 

He flicks the back of his ear to turn his cochlears on and realizes they’re already running, they’re just buzzing dead, rising static into his eardrums. 

Gerry doesn’t get scared. Not anymore. Not since...well.  _ That _ . His mother drugged and bleeding and digging her implants out of the base of her own skull with oddly steady hands and. Yeah. That. 

So he’s not  _ scared _ . Fuck fear. He’s stared down the barrel of worse shit than whatever this glitch is. Maybe he just needs to deep clean and hard reboot all his implants. That’ll suck, but if he’s picked up some kind of virus there’s not much else he can do to get it out. 

He takes a few deep breaths, slides his AR rings on, and flicks down his overlay, feeling that slight burning vibration behind his eyes. He really hates doing this out of the matrix. There’s not a whole lot he prefers doing out of the matrix, actually, if he gets down to it. Sex and drugs are about the only things that feel better in meatspace, and it’s not as if he’s fucked anyone in a good long while.

He figures out where he is and plots a course back to his flat, which is a solid half hour’s walk away. A dotted line extends out ahead of him, and he follows it, eyes still softly burning, and calls Gertrude. 

“Gerard,” she sighs, answering after a few rings. “I’m not interested in continuing our conversation, if that’s what you’d call it.”

“Our--what?” he asks, blinking in alarm, though he can’t say he’s as surprised as he’d like to be.

“I don’t hold it against you, I’m aware I was late, and you have every right to spend your free time how you see fit, but I’m not interested in being party to it. Your mind and work are valuable to me, so I feel I have to put in an obligatory ‘be careful’, but--” Gertrude says, customarily detached and full of sighs, and Gerry finally gets enough of his ability to react to things back to interrupt her.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gerry says. 

“Gerard…” There’s something dangerously close to faintly disgusted pity in Gertrude’s voice, and it turns Gerry’s stomach a bit. “Whatever you took, I would advise against using it in future if it affects your short-term memory this heavily.”

“Yeah, see, I didn’t take anything, though,” Gerry says, rubbing his forehead as he walks. “Last thing I remember, I was hanging out in the matrix waiting for you to call and that glitch showed back up.”

“Glitch?” Gertrude asks, now audibly distracted and irritated.

“The one from that, uh, the boring Siberian Leitner?”

“The one you thought had already been edited?” Gertrude asks, and he’s got her attention again. Talking to her really is too much like talking to Mary used to be. A bid to grab and hold her focus, allowing for a desperate scrabble for approval. He tries to shrug it off, and swallows the sudden under-the-skin itch to ask Mary what she thinks about all this.

“Yeah,” Gerry says. “Showed up in some casino program. Out of nowhere. It took my vocals offline. I think it tried to talk to me, and then just...I was out in the city, half-hour away from my flat.”

“That’s very interesting,” Gertrude says, and Gerry can tell she means it, even if her tone remains guarded. “When I called you about twenty minutes ago, you rattled off fluent and vaguely disturbing nonsense until I hung up.”

A chill blows through Gerry’s body, numbing his heart. He doesn’t get scared anymore, this can’t be fear, but it feels dangerously like it. “Wanna elaborate?”

“I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, if I’m honest,” Gertrude says, tightly. “I assumed you were far gone and I shouldn’t bother trying to speak to you. There must be a virus in your implants.”

“Viruses don’t do that,” Gerry says, a bit breathless. “Lock implants offline, sure. Cause distortions in programs, yeah, fine. Black out your memory and speak nonsensically to your boss? Fuck that. I  _ know _ you’ve never heard of anything like that happening from a virus.”

“Don’t presume to know anything about my experiences, Gerard,” Gertrude snaps, and Gerry thinks it might be more at the unfamiliarity of the situation than at him. “Regardless, you should run Beholding.”

“ _ Fuck _ Beholding,” Gerry says. “My shit’s not going on the Magnus servers.”

“If it’s a virus, Beholding will catch it. This isn’t a discussion. You’re of no use to me compromised.”

“Couldn’t I just hard reset?” Gerry asks.

“That wouldn’t necessarily wipe it. Don’t be difficult. Run Beholding and send me the results.”

“Fine,” Gerry says, shaking his head. “I’ll do it when I get back to my flat.”

“Good,” Gertrude says, irritatingly smug, as she always is when she berates him into doing what she wants him to. 

“Last thing: you really don’t remember anything I said?” Gerry asks, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Gertrude sighs and pauses a moment. “No specifics. It sounded like some horrific amalgamation of old nursery rhymes, but all blended together so they didn’t make sense.”

“And you thought that was just  _ drugs _ ?” Gerry asks, a bit stunned.

“The shit they manufacture these days? Who knows, Gerard.”

“Fine,” Gerry says, sighing. “Later, then.” Gertrude only hums in response, and he hangs up, trying to remember to take deep breaths.

When he finally makes his way back, he sits crosslegged on his floor, lights a joint, and runs Beholding, aggressively taking drags to try and fight the feeling of intense scrutiny as every single program he’s ever run and action he’s ever taken gets systematically surveyed and catalogued. Beholding’s the most insidious shit the corps have ever pulled. Fucking Magnus. No such thing as a free lunch or a free infallible antivirus software.

He’s not surprised when the scan tells him he’s clean, but he’s at least high enough to laugh about it as he sends Gertrude the results. The options remain: he’s either haunted or insane. Both seem pretty reasonable at this point.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not that anyone was begging me to give Gerry a sword, but you're welcome anyway.
> 
> CW: Mary Keay's A+ Parenting

Gertrude’s only response to the Beholding scan is a single  _ Hmm _ , which Gerry can hear in her voice, tight-lipped and irritated by her own lack of control and understanding.  _ Hmm _ isn’t a super helpful response, and Gerry’s restless, especially as the hours wear on and his high dissipates. He doesn’t want to jack back in, a bit worried about the glitch getting to him again, but there’s not a whole lot to do outside of the matrix other than sit and watch bad holodramas on his external AR rig and bite his nails down.

He’s not going to be able to sleep, and he feels like he’s going to go insane if he doesn’t take control of this  _ somehow _ , and he can’t take control if he doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on, which he very much doesn’t. Since Gertrude’s clearly not planning on being much help at the moment, there’s really only one place to turn to.

He steels himself as he jacks in, trying to take deep breaths, etc, because that’s a healthier coping mechanism than most of the others he could choose. When he loads in, he opens the box he keeps all his least favorite shit in, and runs the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead.

The mausoleum is long and full of skin-shrouded corpses. He doesn’t pay attention to any of them, just forces himself down the rows of bodies until he reaches Mary’s. 

“Come on, then,” he says, rapping his tattooed knuckles on the side of her coffin and pulling the shroud back without looking, reminding himself that it’s just code, just zeroes and ones, not real. She might not even be there. Often she’s out exploring the matrix, terrorizing everyone she can. Death didn’t change her a whole lot, not since she somehow beat this file and figured out how to insert herself into it.

If she’s elsewhere, his knock pulls her back. She sits up quickly, like a very irritated vampire, and glares at him. “Gerard.”

“Yeah, hi,” Gerry says, rubbing his face and sighing. “Need your input on something.”

“No,” Mary says, face twisting in disgust and amusement. She’s always loved having power over him. 

“Right. You sure? It’s exactly your sort of thing,” Gerry says, crossing his arms. “It’s not like I’m here for life advice or fucking. Boy talk. I’m not about to subject myself to you unless it’s a you-oriented problem.”

“I’m not all that interested, Gerard.”

“You don’t have to be.” Gerry can’t keep the exasperation out of his voice, even though he knows how hostile it’ll make her. Everything’s always a fucking escalation with her. “Just listen, and if you know anything, tell me, yeah?”

“You don’t give me orders.”

“Then leave!” Gerry throws his hands up. 

“Always such fucking drama with you.” The cold disgust in Mary’s tone makes Gerry want to shatter something with his bare hands, but there’s nothing around, so, fine. Deep breaths. 

“I found a glitch in a Leitner,” Gerry says, powering through, and Mary pauses, form briefly flickering. 

“What sort of glitch?” she asks, and the interest isn’t even begrudging. He almost hates how easy it is to get her attention just by mentioning Leitner. He could tell her he had a terminal illness and she wouldn’t even blink, but a  _ Leitner _ ? Instant undivided focus.

“I don’t know. Nothing I’d encountered before. Scattered, freaking-out, strobing pixels, a really low bit-rate sound that could’ve been a voice.”

“So the file was edited?” Mary asks, almost smiling.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, but it wasn’t,” Gerry says. “And then I saw it again in a regular casino program.”

“Did it manifest the same?”

“No. Sort of? It locked me out of my implants, and there was an--an  _ eye _ , I think, and the voice again, and then I blacked out and woke up half an hour away from my flat,” Gerry says. 

“ _ Fascinating _ ,” Mary says, and now she's grinning. Gerry would call it a wicked grin, but he’d call just about everything Mary does wicked, and not in the fun way. Besides, it’s genuine. He knows she really  _ is _ interested. Thought she would be. 

“Apparently it also...I don’t know. Either it spoke for me or it fried my brain so bad I just...lost memories and coherence, because I had a conversation with…” Mentioning Gertrude’s going to open an entire raincloud of acidic shit that he doesn’t want to deal with right now. “...uh, someone. And they said I was spouting complete nonsense.”

“You usually do.”

“Thanks, Mary,” Gerry says, flatly. “Thoughts?”

“Did you run Beholding?” Mary asks, looking faintly disgusted at the thought.

“Yeah. Completely clean.”

Mary’s form flickers again, and her voice crackles with static. “I’d suspect an Entity.”

“Still not a real thing,” Gerry says, rubbing his forehead. 

“For the last time, Gerard, I’m not sure what you think the Leitners  _ are _ if not--”

“If not the creations of ultra-powerful sentient viruses that defy every fucking law of the matrix? Come on. You  _ know _ how insane that sounds. Leitner was just a talented,  _ evil _ programmer, and--”

“You can’t honestly believe that,” Mary says, and the static consumes her voice. Gerry takes a subconscious step back as she flickers again, and pixels start to peel off her body, bright and all-colorful. 

She flickers. Her hands lengthen. She flickers. She’s barely human.

“Mary?” Gerry breathes. The thing that was Mary just a moment ago cracks its neck and sighs, a droning, painful sound. Fear clenches Gerry’s chest. “Mum?”

“No,” the glitch says, almost amicably. “Not currently.”

“What do you want from me,” Gerry says, trying to flick his UI down as subtly as possible and pull out his sword, not like it’s gonna do a whole lot of good against this thing. It doesn’t matter anyway. He can’t access anything. As he reaches, his vision’s briefly filled with shifting, twisting smiley-face emojis.

“To talk,” the glitch says.

“What are you?” 

“Finally, someone asks the question properly,” the glitch says, and it smiles with Mary’s mouth, a too-wide smile, corners of her lips stretching far beyond where they should. Bile rises in Gerry’s throat. “I’m a distortion.”

“Okay,” Gerry says, blankly, panic still vaguely clawing at the inside of his chest. He has no idea how to get out of this situation, other than trying to jack out, but he can’t shut the program down first, and jacking straight out of a Leitner--particularly  _ this _ Leitner--feels like a bad idea. Maybe worse than hearing this thing out. “What do you want from me?”

“Gertrude Robinson isn’t your friend.” The glitch cocks Mary’s head and regards Gerry with distant, catlike, spiraling eyes. Gerry pointedly looks at a spot above it so he can’t look into its eyes.

“So, what, this is a friendly warning?” Gerry asks, scoffing. “Think I’m going to trust a...whatever you are…”

“Distortion,” it says, helpfully.

“A distortion. Sure. Think I’m gonna trust you after you--fucking  _ what _ , possessed me? Hijacked my mother?” 

“Give her a message for us,” it says.

“Who’s  _ us _ ?”

“ _ Us _ , Hunter.” It giggles. 

“Give me a straight answer or I’m not doing shit. Also,  _ not _ my name,” Gerry says, though part of him feels a twinge of pride at being addressed by a sort-of cool title.

“Give her a message for us, or I’ll give it for you.” It raises a distorted hand, polygons stretched out and clipping strangely.

“Like you did last time?” 

“That was a warning shot. Proof of concept.”

“What’s the message,” Gerry says, flatly.

“Tell her that staying out of the matrix can’t protect her forever.” It flickers, shimmers, briefly scatters, and reforms. 

“Yeah. I’m not about to threaten my boss.” 

“Very well, I’m happy to.”

“No.”

“How will you stop me, Gerard Keay?” it asks, still smiling too widely. “Why defend her?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you. I don’t know what the fuck you are.”

“I’m a distortion,” it repeats, and Gerry sighs, shaking his head.

“That’s not a thing.”

“Fine. Would a name satisfy you?”

“A bit.”

“Michael.”

Gerry almost laughs at what a normal name that is. “Yeah, alright, Michael.”

“Last chance.”

“I’ll take it, thanks,” Gerry says. Michael sighs, a crashing crescendo of static, and there is a door in the thin air between them, and then there isn’t anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All feedback is greatly appreciated <3  
> Find me on tumblr @witnesstotheend


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